Refactoring toward frictionless & odorless code: What about transactions?

One thing that we haven’t done so far is manage transactions. I am strongly against having automatic transactions that wrap the entire request. However, I do like automatic transactions that wrap a single action. We can implement this as:

public class NHibernateActionFilter : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    private static readonly ISessionFactory sessionFactory = BuildSessionFactory();

    private static ISessionFactory BuildSessionFactory()
    {
        return new Configuration()
            .Configure()
            .BuildSessionFactory();
    }

    public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        var sessionController = filterContext.Controller as SessionController;

        if (sessionController == null)
            return;

        sessionController.Session = sessionFactory.OpenSession();
        sessionController.Session.BeginTransaction();
    }

    public override void OnActionExecuted(ActionExecutedContext filterContext)
    {
        var sessionController = filterContext.Controller as SessionController;

        if (sessionController == null)
            return;

        using (var session = sessionController.Session)
        {
            if (session == null)
                return;

            if (!session.Transaction.IsActive) 
                return;

            if (filterContext.Exception != null)
                session.Transaction.Rollback();
            else
                session.Transaction.Commit();
        }
    }
}

This one is pretty simple, except that you should note that we are checking if the transaction is active before trying something. That is important because we might have got here because of an error in the opening the transaction, we would get a second error which would mask the first.